The Roots joined Elvis Costello for a performance of Get Happy! on Fallon, where he was promoting the second season of the Sundance Channel’s Spectacle.

—Tyler Gould

The American Music Awards were last night, giving the most popular acts in the country and the suits that made them a venue on which to stage their feverish masturbations. Some highlights: Adam Lambert fell down in between violent simulations of oral sex, J-Lo fell off of a pile of dancers, and Taylor Swift beat out Daughtry and Jason Mraz to win Favorite Adult Contemporary Artist for an album that is 90% about high school, which reeks of manipulation, as if winning five awards focus grouped better than winning four. Scandal at the AMAs! She’s great, suits. Fearless is a beast of a pop album. She doesn’t need the help. What an outrage! If you had any doubts about rampant crimes against humanity at this event, I present this indisputable evidence: the Black Eyed Peas won something.

Michael Jackson was the big winner of the night, taking four AMAs to the big Neverland Ranch in the sky and finally getting some respect for his all-too underappreciated career.

Rihanna’s great, though:

Rihanna - “Wait Your Turn” and “Hard”

More performances after the jump:

—Tyler Gould

Twelve years ago this week: future platinum-selling Modest Mouse released their second full-length album, The Lonesome Crowded West, one of the best albums of the ‘90s. It was a sign of things to come, filled with dynamic shifts, the raw energy of Isaac Brock’s voice, and the dark, eerie sound that they’ve refined so that you can identify a Modest Mouse song in the space about about a chord and a half.

“Out of Gas”

“Cowboy Dan”

—Tyler Gould

If there was a checklist for Eels archetypes, “Little Bird”, the first track to see the light of day from the band’s forthcoming LP End Times, would fill up more check boxes than just about any other song that E has penned. A simple, delicately strummed melody with a capo at the fifth fret? Check. Direct appeals to God? Check. An avian-centric narrative? Check. Gratuitous use of the word “goddamn”? Check. Pining for a lost love? Double check.

That said, this is also quite possibly the best song that E has written since the landmark Daisies of the Galaxy. A spare, crushingly depressing, brutally honest confessional, the track finds E doing what he does best: moping. One listen to E’s gravelly voice as he admits, “Goddamn, I miss that girl”, should be enough to convince even the weariest of Eels fans that End Times just might be worth looking forward to.

Download the song using the widget below…

—Mehan Jayasuriya

On Saturday night in LA, pop sensation Lady Gaga performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 30th Anniversary Gala. She performed the new ballad “Speechless” from her forthcoming album, The Fame Monster. Russia’s world-renowned Bolshoi Ballet also performed that evening. Talk about pop culture slamming into high culture.

Later that week, Lady Gaga appeared on Gossip Girl in an episode, appropriately named “The Last Days of Disco Stick” which combined Gaga’s musical performance with cheesy narrator duties. In a comment to MTV News, Gaga said, “I am the narrator behind what is going on with the characters and make the song part of the moment. We used these ladders, and I’m falling off ladders. Ladders are kind of a monster symbol about bad luck. And I have this 35-foot-long dress on and these X’s, very gothic-inspired. It was great. They let me do whatever the hell I wanted. It was amazing.”

—Ashley Cooper

The Avett Brothers have been making the rounds to support their major label debut, and here they are again, hitting Fallon with “Slight Figure of Speech” last night:

—Tyler Gould